and academic. Since 1990 he has been Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry
at the State University of New York
Health Science Center in Syracuse
, New York
. He is a well-known social critic of the moral and scientific foundations of psychiatry, and of the social control
aims of medicine in modern society, as well as of scientism
. His books The Myth of Mental Illness
(1960) and The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1970) set out some of the arguments with which he is most associated.
His views on special treatment follow from classical liberal
roots which are based on the principles that each person has the right to bodily and mental self-ownership
and the right to be free from violence from others, although he criticized the "Free World
" as well as the communist state
s for their use of psychiatry and "drogophobia".
Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is.
Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults.
Anxiety is the unwillingness to play even when you know the odds are for you. Courage is the willingness to play even when you know the odds are against you.
If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia. If the dead talk to you, you are a spiritualist; If you talk to the dead, you are a schizophrenic.
Although both the natural and moral sciences seek to understand the objects of their observation, in natural science the purpose of this is to be able to control them better, whereas in moral science it is, or ought to be, to be better able to leave them alone. The morally proper aim of psychology, then, is self-control.
Formerly, when religion was strong and science weak, men mistook magic for medicine; now, when science is strong and religion weak, men mistake medicine for magic.